OUR SEXY BRAIN; OUR COMPELLING ENVIRONMENT: INTERACTIONISM IN FEMALE DEVELOPMENT

The infant female is unique. Her particular qualities include spe-cific genetic, hormonal, and physiological ingredients that help sculpt her development. Parental influences and the wider soci-ety and culture have a profound shaping effect on her particular biological components. Whereas male infants have their own in-imitable developmental line, this paper’s focus is on the female. Our recent history of knowledge about infant development has been schismatically driven, a rift I briefly address herein. This paper is essentially a theoretical one wherein I offer an inte-gration of our current understanding of the complex interactive role of biology and environment in shaping the trajectory of fe-male development. I detail some of the female infants ’ distinc-tive features and their mothers ’ responses to them. THE SCHISM There is increased appreciation of the contribution of biology to the shaping of personality and gender. We are certainly aware of how biological psychiatry has underscored this focus with an increasing reliance on drugs for a wide variety of disorders. The psychologist Wilson (1998), long an advocate of the significant contribution of genetics, has seen his ideas minimized in the past. However, this is changing, as he is joined by Pinker (1994), Turkheimer, (2000) and a host of others (see the essays pre-sented in Einstein, 2007). There is an ever expanding list of the contribution of genes to a wide variety of personality features (shyness, criminality, un